MEGADETH Mainman DAVE MUSTAINE: 'Playing Music Is Political'
September 20, 2007John Serba of The Grand Rapids Press reports: MEGADETH mastermind Dave Mustaine has a whip-quick wit and a playfully sardonic sense of humor, which sometimes makes it hard to separate truth from sarcasm. He's an opinionated and articulate heavy metal icon who, for 25 years, has boldly forged new paths in the genre on the strength of musical skill and pure personality.
Ask him about the themes of new album "United Abominations" — which takes a near-anarchic shotgun-blast approach to all political agendas — and he hedges a bit. Push him further on his right-left affiliation, and he comes up with an appropriate metaphor.
"I'm in the heavy metal centrifuge, I guess you would say," he quipped of his centrist stance during a recent phone interview from his Phoenix-area home. "Maybe the middle of the fuselage."
In the 1980s, MEGADETH was an integral part of metal's evolution. Along with fellow genre luminaries METALLICA, ANTHRAX and SLAYER, Mustaine helped create an aggressive musical strain that burst into the mainstream by the early '90s, when MEGADETH was selling out arenas on the heels of 1992's "Countdown to Extinction". Yet Mustaine doesn't see much difference between artists and politicians.
"I think playing music is political in essence, because it's a platform for you to say something," he said. "It's almost the same as having a podium in a general assembly hall — you're talking to people."
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